Anatomy of Fear

7

Terri Russo turned toward the commotion, two cops dragging a guy into the booking room.

“Get the fuck off me, assholes!”

“Who’s the asshole, huh?” said one of the cops, face bright red. He elbowed the cuffed man in the ribs while the other cop slammed him into a metal chair and cuffed him to it-a good thing, as the guy was bucking like one of those kiddy rides they used to have in front of dime stores and supermarkets.

Detective Jenny Schmid of Sex Crimes made her way across the room to greet the detectives and their prey.

“This the piece of shit?” she asked.

The red-faced cop said, “No question. We got a call, a break-in, and look who we find.” He handed Schmid a paper with a picture on it.

“You read him his rights?” asked Schmid, leaning over the guy, who was huffing like a horse after a run, his nostrils flaring. She held the picture up.

Terri glanced from the police sketch in the detective’s hand to the guy cuffed to the chair.

Schmid dangled the sketch in front of the perp’s face. “Looks like you fucking posed for this.”

The other cops in the room stopped writing up reports and turned toward the show, practically twitching in their chairs, waiting for an excuse to take a pot-shot at the perp. And they might have if some office type in khakis and a button-down shirt hadn’t come in with a big carton of folders, which he plopped onto a desk so he could get a good look too.

Schmid peered at him over the top of her glasses. “And you are?”

“Office of Public Info,” he said. “Just delivering some stuff for Detective Towers.”

“Well, deliver it,” she said. “And go.”

The guy lifted the box, but leaned over to peek at the drawing at the same time. “Wow,” he said. “That’s really good.”

“Thanks so much for your expert opinion,” said Schmid, who aimed a finger at the door.

The guy narrowed his eyes at her, then sighed and left, balancing the carton in one hand like a waiter with a tray.

Terri cleared her throat.

Schmid acknowledged her with a slight turn of her head and another look of annoyance.

“That sketch,” Terri asked. “Who made it?”

Schmid sighed as if Terri had asked her to donate a kidney, but handed it over before going back to her suspect.

Terri flipped it over, noted the date, time, name of the witness, and the sketch artist, Nathan Rodriguez. She looked back and forth between the sketch and its living embodiment cuffed to the chair, the resemblance dead-on. Rodriguez had a gift, no question.

How did he do it? She could not imagine. But then, all Rodriguez had needed was one look at her unsub’s drawings to know they were made by the same man, one who was right-handed-and the lab had confirmed it. The sketches had come from the same kind of sketch pad, the glue that had held them in place still detectable along the edge of each. It was something, a connection, though nothing a DA could take to court. If they were lucky they might find something on the drawings other than the vics’ blood, though so far there was nothing.

But it was the same MO, the unsub had a signature, a ritual. Something else Rodriguez had been right about. She’d fed that info-two vics, two drawings-into VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, but there’d been no match.

A serial killer. Something no one wanted to say aloud. Not yet. Terri knew what it meant: that the feds would be all over it, and soon. Serial killers were their thing. Though in the last few years those particular bad boys had ceded a little bit of their numero uno status to terrorists, which the bureau was not quite as good at capturing or deterring, not that there was any way to deter serial killers unless the government opted for sterilizing all potentially abusive parents, for a start, which Terri thought was a damn good idea. Of course there was still that unexplainable part, the “evil gene” so many scientists were talking about these days. Score one for nature versus nurture, thought Terri. No doubt that cheered the parents of the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world.

“You saving that picture for framing?” Schmid asked.

“Sorry,” said Terri. She handed it back to the detective and cut out of the booking room, thinking about Nate Rodriguez and his special gifts. She wasn’t sure how he was going to help her, but she was working on it.